8/4 News Roundup & Open Thread – The Progressive Wing

Politics Now co-host Patrick Walker interviews democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders about the 2020 election:

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LieparDestin

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LieparDestin

How Bernie Sanders Changed the Health-Care Debate

Widespread enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal has forced moderate candidates to put forward plans that are well left of the Affordable Care Act.

LieparDestin

Bernie Sanders Says Student Debt Cancellation Plan Will Reduce Racial Wealth Gap

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Saturday that his plan to cancel all student debt would reduce the racial wealth gap, contrary to the claims of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Sanders was one of 19 candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to speak at a candidate forum hosted by the public-sector labor union AFSCME in Las Vegas.
Warren, a populist often grouped alongside Sanders ideologically, said during her appearance at the forum earlier in the day that she had decided to abolish 95% of student debt, rather than all of it, because canceling all of it would exacerbate the wealth gap between black and white Americans.
HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel, who moderated the discussion alongside Jon Ralston of The Nevada Independent, asked Sanders to respond to Warren’s claim.
“As I understand it ― I don’t have all the facts in my head now ― our plan will reduce the racial wealth gap from 12 to 1 for younger people, to 5 to 1,” Sanders said. “That’s pretty significant.”
Sanders later added a statistic he said he learned recently about how student debt affects black college graduates.
“For African American young people, 12 years after they took out the debt, they are more in debt than when they took it out in the first place, because of interest rates,” he said. “And that is really crushing an entire generation.”
..
Sanders was clearly one of the crowd favorites, drawing warm applause for his entry and many of his responses to questions. When Sanders finished his remarks, some in the audience broke into chants of “Ber-nie, Ber-nie, Ber-nie.”

LieparDestin

Bernie Sanders explains why it’s his time to win Nevada

Sen. Bernie Sanders saw his campaign for the presidency in Nevada end in narrow failure once before, and in an interview Saturday with the Review-Journal, he explained why he believes it will not happen again.
“We did well here last time,” Sanders said. “When I came here, I think a lot of people did not know who Bernie Sanders was. But we organized, we educated and we did everything we could. We ended up losing this state, but not by a lot. And my hope is that this time, with a great staff and an incredible number of volunteers, we’re going to win here.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ended up beating Sanders by about five percentage points in the 2016 Nevada caucuses, gaining 20 pledged delegates to his 15.
Sanders said Nevada is “enormously important” to his plans for securing the 2020 nomination. He wryly and correctly noted that most of the more than two dozen 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls are going to say that, and for good reason.
“We’ve got Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and California,” Sanders said. “And my guess is that any candidate who does particularly well in those five states is going to be the nominee and the next president of the United States.”
Sanders said that when he last campaigned in Nevada, many of his cornerstone ideas — Medicare for All, free college tuition, the legalization of marijuana, a $15 minimum wage — were seen as “too radical.” State governments, American citizens and many Democratic politicians — including several of Sanders’ 2020 opponents — have since latched on to many of these ideas.
Many of the candidates now making their pitches to Nevadans for Medicare for All and other ideas he championed in 2016 are actually talking about very different versions of what he hopes to accomplish, Sanders said. He repeated that he “wrote the damn bill” on Medicare for All— a callback to his impassioned response to Ohio congressman Tim Ryan during this week’s debates.

LieparDestin

Don midwest

from a couple of days ago on The Intercept

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Dominate Democratic Debate Set Up to Ambush Them

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” Warren said to cheers.

Having constructed the entire debate to generate disagreements between the progressive candidates, whose ideas are finding support from Democratic primary voters, and centrist candidates who are struggling to get past 1 percent in the polls, CNN concluded the evening with the headline it had worked so hard to create: “Breaking News: Liberal and Moderate Democrats Clash in Detroit.”

Update: Wednesday, July 31, 3:21 p.m. EDT
The morning after the debate, the Republican party helpfully proved that Warren and Sanders were right to say that it was a Republican talking point to focus only on the need to increase taxes to pay for Medicare for All, while ignoring the fact that total costs would go down for working families that no longer have to pay outrageous premiums and deductibles.
On Wednesday morning, the Republican National Committee tweeted out video of a post-debate interview in which Chris Matthews of MSNBC repeatedly pressed Warren to say if taxes would go up, and completely ignored her point that “out of pocket costs for middle class families,” are, under the plan she and Sanders endorse, “actually going to go down.”

Don midwest

how crazy things are when what is worthless is worth going to war?

last gasp of capitalism? last gasp of empire?

The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have very little going for them other than petroleum, which is actually worthless. That is, as understanding of the catastrophic impacts of our climate emergency sinks in the with public, a rush to electric cars fueled by wind and solar will gain momentum. Leaving Saudi Arabia and the UAE (as well as the Koch brothers and assorted other B-movie villains) high and dry.

This is a recent article from Juan Cole (because we just found out about this) on how Trump had Saudi Arabia and UAE censure his America First speech in 2016.

Yet another example that Trump puts corporations first which what he has done

Why Trump let Saudi Arabia and UAE censor his “America First” Speech on Energy

Don midwest

a white supremacist movement encouraged by Trump not just a deranged killer

this is further reason for Nancy Pelosi to begin impeachment inquiry

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The slaughter of 20 persons in and around a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, by a virulent white nationalist on Saturday was not just a “mass shooting.” It was a profound act of terrorism.
Nor was it the action of a single person. The alleged shooter was invested in Trump’s talking points about a wall and had bought into the crazed conspiracy theory that wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs are bringing in immigrants to work cheaply and replace the white race. Hence his fulminating against the so-called “Hispanic invasion” and his praise of the shooter at New Zealand’s Christchurch mosque (a shooter himself inspired by Trump).
It isn’t enough to say that the El Paso terrorist was “hate-filled and racist,” as El Paso police characterized him. That makes it sound personal and idiosyncratic. This man was part of a movement, a movement that is being actively promoted from the White House. The difference between a crime and terrorism is that a crime is for personal gain and its not ideological. This was ideological.
Does anyone have any doubt at all that if the person had been a Muslim with a similar manifesto, substituting Islamic themes and grievances for those of white nationalism, the national security state and the US media would be in overdrive blaming the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims?
And yet white nationalists skate because their ideology seems less threatening to. . . white people.
It isn’t less threatening. It is a national emergency. Research published at WaPo shows that in counties where Trump held rallies in 2016, hate crimes rocketed 226%.
Nationally, hate crimes are growing 9% a year, with Arab-Americans, Jews, and LGBTQ individuals seeing big spikes in hate crimes directed against them.

from Juan Cole today
White Supremacist Terrorism strikes Again in the Age of Trump and Putin

orlbucfan

Nancy Pelosi is either a) corrupt b) semi-senile c) neo-liberal coward. All 3 fit her. Over half the House are lining up behind impeachment. If more continue to join, that may finally force her hand. We’ll see. T and R, LD!!

Don midwest

Never thought I would post this guy

ONE.
JUST ONE.
I'd like to see ONE Republican lawmaker step up and condemn white supremacist terrorism.
Just ONE.#DomesticTerrorism #ElPasoShooting
— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) August 4, 2019

polarbear4

“If the Dayton police had not gotten to the shooter in under a minute, hundreds of people in the Oregon District would be dead today,”
“This is the 250th mass shooting in America,”https://t.co/NsMTG0HoRY
— 🔥Look See Bern🔥 (@Look_See_Think) August 4, 2019

wi61

Number of mass shootings since the 1st of January 2019.

US: 251

Mexico: 3,Canada: 1, Brazil: 1,Netherlands: 1,New Zealand: 1,Denmark: 0,Italy: 0

Spain: 0,Sweden: 0,South Korea: 0,Australia: 0,Germany: 0,UK 0,France:0 and Japan: 0

Besides the mental health issues that causes these people to go “off” (M4A Desperately needed). How much many of these shootings had emboldened by these shooters constancy hearing politicians blaming immigrants and POC for their lot in life. Then you have a president that fuels the hate and racism by using words as infestation. Telling Dem elected politicians to go back to where they came from because their POC.

polarbear4

https://twitter.com/jmmiller1208/status/1157990932744155136?s=20

polarbear4

Gilroy: 3 dead, 12 injured
El Paso: 20 dead, 26 injured
Dayton: 9 dead, 16 injured
JUST IMAGINE, there were 3 ISIS-inspired attacks killing 32 & injuring 54 people in one week. Would we be talking about mental health? Would we be talking about video games? Absolute disgrace.
— Francis Maxwell (@francismmaxwell) August 4, 2019

wi61

Or POC in general, Then the R’s and their talking heads would be coming out of the woodwork on how the borders would have to be closed and immigration suspended.

polarbear4

New Rule: Any politician who claims "it is a mental health issue" must be forced to co-sponsor HR 1384 #MedicareForall bill.
— Esha 🌹 (@eshaLegal) August 4, 2019

polarbear4

👌👌👍👍✊✊✊❤❤❤ pic.twitter.com/nsCvxjmQVX
— April Guittar (@LincolnDuncan8) August 4, 2019

Don midwest

article in NYT about importance of labor unions

Yes, America Is Rigged Against Workers
No other industrial country treats its working class so badly. And there’s one big reason for t

polarbear4

https://twitter.com/argumentwinner/status/1157800590879186944?s=20
To be clear, they both should be alive.

polarbear4

when a cop sees a dog pic.twitter.com/RUrLu1cxgV
— patrick (@lunch_enjoyer) August 3, 2019

orlbucfan

Cops look like something out of a bad sci-fi dystopian movie or TV show.

polarbear4

Keep in mind that @HarrisPoll is run by one of the most corrupt grifters in the business: Mark Penn. He not only started the Birther Movement as Hillary's chief campaign strategist, he was so incompetent he had to be fired when it came out he didn't understand how primaries work. https://t.co/LkevoAshI3
— Plain Ol' Johnny Graz (@jvgraz) August 4, 2019

polarbear4

🤪🤪🤭 pic.twitter.com/19ObnHa9bB
— ♥★ℌᎲᕊ★♥ (@Oi__4i) August 4, 2019

magsview

Hahaha